Captured through a Nikon D850 and AF-S Nikkor 300mm F2.8 lens using a robotic mount by Nikon-owned robotics company Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC), the 155° view presents the city in an incredible amount of detail, with Nikon claiming that you can read signs up to 5 miles away from where the image was captured.

The full frame

A fully zoomed-in frame from the center of the picture above

The Twenty Four Hour London project was taken on by Visualise—a company of virtual reality filmmakers—in partnership with Nikon UK and MRMC. The camera was supported and moved by MRMC’s Ulti-Head robotic camera mount, which allowed Stuart to repeat the exact shooting position—to pixel level, according to the release —for 260 shots per hour over the course of the 24-hour sequence.

Once processed and stitched together, the resulting image allows viewers to pick the time of day and to zoom into the image to see the details of distant buildings—and even people relaxing inside their apartments!

The concept was a commission for Lenstore, a UK vision-care company, to promote eye health. To see the full 7 gigapixel 'timelapse' for yourself, and explore London in all its glory, head over to the 24 Hour London website.

24 Hour London is a unique collaboration between Lenstore, Nikon, Visualise and the Nikon-owned robotics company MRMC. Together they have created the biggest ever time-lapse of London’s skyline, taken from the roof of Canary Wharf’s One Canada Square.

In total, over 6,240 photos were taken across a 155-degree view over 24 hours, and subsequently stitched together to create an incredibly detailed panorama, and the first gigapixel timelapse of London. This level of detail was achieved by combining a Nikon D850 and AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8 lens with MRMC’s robotic Ulti-Head to precisely repeat the same pattern of detailed photos 260 times an hour for 24 hours. The finished product allows you to see London change colours across the hours, from sunrise to sunset, with all the shades the capital has to offer in between.

We’re thrilled to be involved with this unique project. The Nikon D850 captured London in incredible detail in challenging conditions. Finding the best combination of camera, lens and precise motion-control was essential for this project and we are proud to have been integral to its success.

The project was shot by Henry Stuart from Visualise, he had the following to say:

Shooting gigapixel photos is hard – we have been shooting them for the Olympics, the World Cup, for events and places all around the globe. Each panorama is so large it needs specially built computers to process it. In this case, we had to build a special server system and network all of the workstations in our studio to the content so that we could stitch five of the photos at a time.

To capture a photo like this you need a really capable camera – we used the Nikon D850. It has this beautiful big sensor and captures a huge range of light and dark (large dynamic range). This is so important when shooting panoramas where one part of the image is bright, such as towards the sun, and another is dark such as over the Thames. We shot everything on the camera’s ‘RAW’ setting, which keeps loads of extra information in the shots that you would usually lose.

The 24 Hour London ‘Gigalapse’

The image is 7.3 Gigapixels (7,300 Megapixels or 7bn pixels), which is over 1000x more powerful than the camera on an iPhone X.

The Nikon D850 and Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8 lens combination delivered phenomenal detail – you can even read signs which are up to 5 miles away in the photo!

The robotic motion control technology using the MRMC Ulti-Head used to create the pinpoint accuracy of images, leading to every single pixel of every point in the panorama being the exact same position as the photos 24 hours earlier.

OK was going to complain that they got the whole Westminster Houses of parliament obscured then I realised that through the eye you can see that it's lined up almost bang on with South Carriage Drive with the Hyde Park Barracks' Tower, Albert Memorial and the Mandarin Oriental - now that's extreme perspective compression as I was wondering what damn hell steeple of Westminster I was seeing through the Eye but no it's the spire on Albert memorial

It is like this. They wanted to take a panorama from a roof of some suitable tower in London. For some reason, that we do not know, they got access to this one. There the view is as it is, with monstrous house constructions and all. They could have done it one year earlier, missing tha construction, but they did not. They could have waited one year, and then there would be another tower instead, but they did not. And that is it.

If you want to you can see this as a documentation of the view over London from that tower plus another tower being built. I guess the future will find it interesting if it finds it.

as Roland Karlsson points out it is what it is, London, like most modern cities, is not some static landscape occasionally punctuated by small fits and spurts of construction. Rather the crane dotted lands scape _IS_ what London is. and without even zooming in it is possible to pick out almost 20 other cranes on over a dozen other development sites, zooming in shows dozens, and dozens, and dozens, and yet dozens more again, cranes and building sites.. I gave up less than a third of the way through the fully zoomed in image after spotting well over 50 individual development sites.

For better and/or worse developments ARE as much London as old buildings and monuments, pubs and football.

I can't easily find any mention of what stitching software he used. Does anyone have any ideas? Something off the shelf like PTGui or so a customized piece of coding? Also how were what I call "stitching glitches" - where an object like a car or a person was in motion where the frames over lapped.

You need to find a high building where you have access to the roof where you get a nice non-obscured view over London. Also one where the Themes has a nice meandering look. Right in the city center is wrong. It shall be at a suitable distance. I assume pluses are if you get the Tower Bridge and the Eye of London in the image, plus the high spectacular sky scrapes. Maybe the South Bank Tower? It is round though. A roof with corners is to prefer. And - the interesting stuff is more than 155 degrees apart. So ... maybe somewhere else.

Looking around with Google map 3D I found an interesting tower near to Tottenham Court Road station. There you see all the bridges straight on, one after the other. Do not know if it is high enough. According to Google maps it has teracces on the roof that looks very promising.

Personally I do not think it looks all that awful. The river is rather picturesque there and there are interesting things around. You even see Tower Bridge :) But you also see some outskirts with things you normally do not see.

And, as I said, you need to find a tower with clear view on the roof. Most towers do not have accessible roofs at all. That they have a tourist lookout is mostly a disadvantage also.

And to have it in the middle of everything is not an advantage really. You are then standing in a tower you want to have in the image. And nearby things are invisible, because it is not easy looking down.

And in many places you might have to build a platform, or something to look out over fences or other stuff.

Moreover - they might have very easy access to the tower they used.

As I said - that tower at Tottenham Court Road looks promising.

BTW - anyone knows which tower they used. I have tried to pin it down. It might be the one at 8 Canada Square with the HSBC Swiss Bank.

Just for fun. Lets say a few light years is 25 light years, then we need a magnification of 100.000 times. Lets say that we have a telescope with 10 meter focal length and F10 (1 meter mirror) at 25 light years away. Sounds reasonable. Lets see what Nikon has to make then. Multiply all dimensions with 100,000 times.

A focal length of 1 million meter and a diameter o 100,000 meter. Easy! Just a matter of money :)

I think I will stick to panoramas using my 20mm f/1.8 Nikkor on my Nikon D610. That is because I cannot afford a printer to make prints 75 feet wide and I am not sure where I would keep them even if I did.

OK - doing some research. A 300 mm lens has 7 degrees horizontal FOV. And the Horizontal FOF in the image is 155 degrees. So, with almost no overlap (which I think is possible for this machine) that is 22 images wide. Make it just a small overlap, 20 is reasonable. So - every view is 260 images. That is not all that impressive really. It would be a bit less than 1 GP when removing overlap. But, it has to be downscaled to 7GP/24 = 130 MP per view.

"Only" having 130 MP per view might explain the softness when zooming in fully. There is simply not enough pixels for this magnification.

well, the gigapixel thing is not new, and yes, not impressive. But the time lapse of a gigapixel is the novelty part :) ... sure it's not the discovery of the wheel, if you can do one, you also can do 24 of them. But nonetheless it is really impressive and, at least for me, is the first time i hear of such a thing.

Each image is 260 stills of ~45MP each. To do feature detection,, you need about a 30% overlap. So the 11 gigapixels ( 260 x 45 ) would yield about a 7 gigapixel yield image. So yes, it is 24 .... 7 gigapixel images.

Some of my stained glass projects are anologous, using a 300mm lens and tiling 80 to 120. my 7 years old basement server grinds out a 500 megapixel image including feature detection, alignment, and so on, in about an hour. With about 30% CPU usage. enblend and enfuse are not particularly optimized for parallelization so you get about a 400% speed up. there is a lot of idle time doing single threaded tasks. So in fact I can do 2 or 3 of these concurrently - and often do without really maxxing out the box. The computing aspect of their project is rather less impressive than it sounds.

But yeah, 7 gigapixel images using what for most of us would be an unimaginably expensive / simultaneously fun array of technologies, people, and time. :-) Cool!

Yawwwnnn. I'm sorry, but this picture is like, so what? Just because you can do it?It's London, day and night. I've seen that before. So what's new here? Are we impressed at its gigapixel size? Again, yawnnn. Who is going to actually look at this? Maybe it's of some use as advertising for the virtual reality sponsor, but come on. Art? A machine made it. Compelling? No.

well given it was a commercial assignment I don't think "Art" is on the compelling "must have" list... as for a machine made it... well best get back to making art with drawing or painting... maybe at most a glass plate loaded pinhole camera, as soon as you get any sort of aperture control beyond manually inserted disks, and/or shutters that aren't you pulling the lens cap off and counting to how ever many seconds your sunny 16 rules says you're using a machine, even a browny box camera uses a mechanical shutter fits bang on with the dictionary definition of a machine as being "an apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task"

Setting that shot up is a whole lot harder than one might think. And it's the photographer who is setting it up. Robotic arms, astrophotography tracking mounts, drones are just more tools in the photographers arsenal. Granted they aren't cheap or for the faint of heart.

1. At what point is the robot the real photographer. OK - not maybe this time, but the next, when the robot is a fully autonomous drone?

2. It is quite boring after some hours at that roof. So, what is the photographer really doing for those 24 hours? Is it really fully automatic? Maybe the photographer did stay there for the first round of images. Which also took a while.

3. How about permission in London? In Sweden this would have been defined to be a surveillance camera. Quite strong regulations for those. I know that London is full of them. Maybe it is easier there.

4. Exposure. The different times of day needs different exposures, and it is my experience that it is very important to make a good compromise dependent on lighting. And, I assume that all images in a round used the same exposure. So - how was it chosen?

1) the person controlling the process is the photographer. By definition a photographer is a person.2) yes, photography can be boring, ie, waiting endless hours for the right light, or the right elements to come together in the scene.3) don't know about the surveillance thing...the world is definitely becoming a scary place.4) don't know how this photographer set up his exposures, but auto exposure could be one way.

1) It is quite important to define "controlling the process". E.g. in crimes you are not guilty if you had a moment of insanity and was not in control of yourself. So, maybe if someone takes photos not being in control, he can't get the Copyright? We also have the problem of copyright for automatic photographs, like surveillance and automatic photo booths. Or, in the near future, robots that takes photos. Maybe self driving Google bots that take Google map images. They are programmed and no one really sets them up or controls them.

2) That was not my question. I wondered if they had some boring moments, or not.

4) Auto exposure (image by image) usually is not recommended for stitching. You get strange color shifts, easily visible in the sky.

I can imagine that it can happen even if the owner of the machine is a photographer. Think accident. Think automatic. Think accidentally operated by animal. Think ... did not know it had a camera. Think .. forgot to turn it off.

Incredable feat of photography. The Nikon D850 and 300mm f:2.8 seems to have been a good choice. If this where to be printed out on a 300 dpi printer you would have a very long photograph. The detail is amazing and I hope Stuart does this for more cities like NYC, Paris etc. The fact that he is self taught is even more remarkable. Keep up the good work and keep amazing us.

@RolandTrue! I often get comments about how well the music fits when I show my home videos of my holidays and family. Sometimes I let the music determine the rhythm of the editing, or the other way around. I just like to be creative. This is a hobby for me. This is bad in so many ways. I'm sorry, it's cringing.

Making a time-lapse does not mean one has video-talent. The same with those "camera reviews on YT". Everyone with a phone think they are some kind of oracle.

(Off-topic: it's the same in stores. Being a photographer or a musician, does not make you a good salesperson. They think they are, but they're not. They NEVER listen tot he customer and always want to showcase their (sometimes lack of) knowledge.)

@photoMEETING, I can't speak for the D850 comment, but the focus in this TL is terrible. The image is way too soft to be zoomed. Why have a zoomable TL when the zoomed images are rubbish? You might as well be trying to see detail in a CIA released photo! :)

This is a throwback to the 19th century when people would spend hours with magnifying glass in hand delving into the details of prints made from enormous glass plate panoramic negatives. For their next trick we can expect them to produce amazing stereoscopic photos that we'll gaze at in our parlors listening to Caruso on the gramophone with the cat curled up behind the coal stove.

Would have been more impressive if the images had been in sharp focus. The focus was way too soft to zoom in without thinking they shanked the focus. Technology wise, they are basically creating a panorama for each frame in the time lapse. So basically they need a good programable mount and a huge amount of processing power to build the TL. Nothing really cutting edge here, much less bleeding edge. And doing samples with such soft focus makes it even more "mehhhhh"...

Yes. It's extremely impressive. You'd think Nikon would do something "LA centric" especially since their pricey move away from their convenient El Segundo location to Valet-parking only Wilshire Blvd as it was likely a PR move.

The best time however was probably during the 18th century when it was said that one could stand on Parliament Hill (NW London) and gaze around towards Richmond Park (SW London) without skyscrapers in between.

I don't understand the objective of this. I don't understand the technology.

It seems that an image would be captured, then the camera rotated a specific amount, and another image captured, etc etc. Thea few minutes/hours/days later it would start over again?? But the sun would be in a different position??

"Once processed and stitched together, the resulting image allows viewers to pick the time of day and to zoom into the image to see the details of distant buildings—and even people relaxing inside their apartments!"

I could be mistaken on this one, but with the latest EU regulation change for 2018, the photographer would - theoretically - need the release of EVERY subject in the picture.... I admit, I haven't fully read the new GDPR in detail, but at least this is what I got from reading through some of the key-facts....please correct me if I'm mistaken here ...

whilst this poses a LOT of added work and might be a kill-switch for certain types of street photography, I am not convinced this is practically a bad thing in todays social-media happy world.... maybe it gets people to think twice before taking a photo and simply sharing it without consent.

Electrophoto, that would really, really suck if you had to get releases from everyone. Could you imagine if there was a mass of people to see your favorite soccer (football) team that just won the World Cup and you had to get a model release from every single person that came out to see it?

If you hold an image of an identified person (or persons), then I'm sure that will fall under the new GDPR legislation; but if you have an image which contains persons unknown then I can't see how that is holding personal information - as they haven't been identified. If someone identifies themselves in this image, then they would be entitled to make requests under GDPR (such as removal of personal information). But if you ask the photographer, do you hold personal information about me (without identifiying yourself in the image), then the answer is no.

@the-bunker. I am not 100% sure what you are saying. Lets say I take an image, without explicitly identifying. But one person in the image is well known. Or someone recognizes a person in the image. Is the image then storing of personal information?

Lets say that I have an album with photos of relatives and friends, dead or alive. What is that? NOTE - we all have such albums in one way or another. No sane person can have written regulations that makes family albums illegal. Can they?

Lets say I have written the names of the people in the album. Lets say I also have written when the image was taken, and even place, and that this image is from a birthday party. Not uncommon things to write in a family album. Is this illegal now?

The purpose of GDPR is about data privacy & ability for the public to have some control over the data that is held on them by organisations. Images are a bit of a grey area, as on their own do not really constitute "data" without accompanying personal information or some means of personal identification. If you are not a club or other form of organisation - then GDPR doesn't really apply to you; however if you share information of others with a 3rd party organisation (such as an image hosting site), then imho it must apply - hence my point about identifying yourself in an online image & being able to ask for it to be removed.So, holding albums of images of people for your own purposes is fine - but as soon as you start sharing that info, it could fall under GDPR. The image on it's own (without identification) is not really enough to constitute personal data - but as soon as personal identification is made, then it does.However GDPR is not a black & white, all or nothing set of rules!

I would add as an example that if you asked Facebook to remove all images of yourself from their website, then they could rightly say that they can only remove images of you that are specifically identified to you. However, if you said "this" image contains me & I am asking you to remove it, then they would have a hard time refusing you - because personal identification of that "data" (the image) has been made.Of course this is all my viewpoint - it will all come out in the wash once the regs come into force & some high profile cases test it.

OK. Thanks. All such laws and regulations are problematic in one way or another. And need to be tested with real cases. GDPR is actually intresting. We are living in times when organisations collects more and more data and it is becoming a bit uncomfortable.

My phone (Android) do things I am not really sure I want it to do. And - I am not 100% sure if what it does is fully local to the phone or something Google (or other) has full access to in some cloud.

One such thing it does is asking me to rate a restaurant I just visited (or walked by). That might just be a local app in the phone that samples what is around. Or it might be Google tracking me. I do not know. If it is the latter I want to turn it off ASAP.

For this service it was the Google Map app that had the setting. It was something about "Give score for XXX". It was food, events, places, ... You could also add extra information for a place. I think this is local. I have now turned it off also. Do not like those questions. And there is a small chance that it is bypassing my setting regarding no location service.

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